County Prisons

State and county corrections generally have the same goals in mind; to make sure the community is safe, and to punish any criminals that harm the community. The first major difference between state and county corrections is the jurisdiction they have. County corrections only worry about crime that happen within the county it is in charge of. These crimes are generally small and don’t usually cross the county lines. On the other hand, the state is concerned about crimes that happen across multiple counties. The reason for this is simple; the state simply cannot deal with every single crime that happens within the state. Instead, the state delegates the crimes and their punishments to whatever county they happened in, unless, of course, the …show more content…
Probation is basically a supervised warning. I call it a supervised warning because it’s a warning that if you break another law, or break your promises, they will send you to jail, and the government will watch you to make sure you don’t do either of those. Probation comes with terms to make sure that they don’t commit any more crimes, while they are under the court’s supervision. These terms may or may not include incarceration time, but these instances will vary in each case. Parole is an early release from a long prison sentence. There are many ways to be eligible for parole, and one of them is to behave while incarcerated. Because of the realignment California is going through, they are giving a day of good time for every day that a prisoner behaves. This means that a prisoner convicted of a crime would only need to served half the sentence, but since they actually want to punish criminals, they changed it so that the prisoner will have to spend at least 85% of their sentence in order to be eligible for early release. Parole is very similar to probation, but the main difference is that parole is an early supervised release from a prison sentence. There are also certain crimes that make the prisoner ineligible for parole, including very, very violent crimes. Another effect of the realignment is that most criminals are being sent out on parole instead of being …show more content…
For starters, we only have three levels of courts. There are the lower courts, which are courts for the counties that usually deal with small-time crimes in the county level. Then there is the appellate court, which checks on whether or not the accused got a fair trial while in the lower courts. Then there is the Supreme Court which goes over the California constitution and determines if the laws within the counties and cities violate the California constitution. In some states, the lower courts are organized depending on the type of cases that they hear, and those courts will only review cases of that nature. For example, traffic courts will only go over traffic violations and family courts will only go over matters involving family issues such as adoptions and divorces. Appeals can only be done after the accused has been convicted of the crime, and they then submit an application to the appellate court, so they can review whether the lower courts violated any of his rights. Just because they submitted an application for an appeal, it does not guarantee a hearing in the appellate court. They appellate court determines if there are grounds for the appeal, and they go from there. The Supreme Court deals with cases that have gone through the appellate court, but they feel that the law violates the California constitution, or if the law is too confusing. The Supreme Court also attempts to interpret the law that